Biodiversity underpins life on Earth, providing essential ecological, economic, and cultural services critical to human well-being. However, ecosystems worldwide are increasingly being transformed, degraded, and fragmented. Species extinction rates now surpass historical background levels, a significant portion of natural habitats has been lost, and many ecosystem functions and services are under severe threat.
In Europe, over 30% of terrestrial habitats have been classified as "threatened," primarily due to agricultural intensification, urbanization, climate change, and pollution. Meanwhile, the effectiveness of protected areas in safeguarding biodiversity remains a topic of ongoing debate, partly due to a lack of long-term data to assess conservation outcomes.
Assessing biodiversity changes is complex and requires comprehensive approaches. Yet, most studies addressing vegetation change have been local in scope, focusing on single habitats without testing the exceptionality of observed trends. These studies often investigate only one level of biological organization, primarily emphasizing taxonomic diversity while neglecting other important aspects. At the same time, despite numerous studies examining the efficiency of protected areas—such as comparing species richness in protected versus non-protected areas—there remains a significant gap in evidence regarding their overall effectiveness. This gap includes evaluations of biological outcomes over time, consideration of counterfactual scenarios, and the incorporation of multiple facets of biodiversity.
Resurveying studies offer a promising approach to quantifying temporal changes in biodiversity across previously inaccessible spatial and temporal scales, and thus provide an unparalleled opportunity to explore the patterns and drivers of historical changes in European plant communities.
Given that plants are foundational components of habitats, robust, long-term assessments of changes in plant communities are critical for establishing baseline data for biodiversity monitoring, guiding conservation planning, and implementing effective measures to mitigate biodiversity loss.
In this context, VegTrends aimed to produce the first comprehensive and representative report on temporal trends in the vegetation of European open habitats by assessing long-term trends in the vegetation of open European habitats and evaluating the effectiveness of protected areas in conserving these habitats.
